change in tie/spacing in Lilypond?

[Felipe Gasper]

Hello,

     I have downloaded an old .ly file from
http://www.upv.es/coro/victoria/ly/Conditor_Alme_Siderum.ly. The file is for
Lilypond 1.4.12.

I am trying to transpose this score, so I downloaded it and converted to
2.10.25. After futzing with a few things that the converter didn’t know how to
do, I am finding that I have to update all of the lyrics manually to accommodate
what appears to be a change in how lyrics were entered.

In the old file, there are spacers (i.e. “_”) for each tie. For 2.10.25, I need
to remove these spacers in order to have the notes line up correctly.

Is there a way to tell 2.10.25 to interpret these spacers the same way as 1.4.12
does so that I don’t have to adjust the text manually?

Thank you for your time.